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It had been a good day, for the most part, better than most, even if that tended to be something of a stretch. Good was something of a low bar these days. Good meant that he didn’t lash out or simply shut down entirely when some stranger bumped into him on the subway. It meant he was actually able to take the subway without the crowded, enclosed space flipping every single alarm in his mind. Good meant that he hadn’t lost time to flooding memories and horrors forced on him.
Good meant that he got a somewhat reasonable amount of sleep the night before, despite the disturbingly uneventful mission he’d returned from just the morning before.
More or less uneventful, in the fact that they–Bucky and the Avengers–hadn’t had any injuries or casualties, hadn’t really faced any assault whatsoever.
Disturbing in the fact that the Hydra location they’d gone to investigate and clear out had been little more than a tomb by the time they got there. Most of the building’s occupants seemed to have succumbed to poison via their own false tooth. Those that didn’t, well, if ever Bucky had the curiosity of what a body drained dry might look like, he’d gotten his answer.
Disturbing. Enough that it seemed to override the general paranoia and hypervigilance that both pre- and proceeded every Hydra mission he wound up on. But, apparently, not so much that his dreams decided to add that to his long list of nightmare fodder.
Ghosts and memories and demons were commonplace these days. Bucky was too familiar with the haunting presence of the too many people that he was once the same horrifying presence to. Following, learning their routines and their habits, lurking out of sight just long enough to use it all against them. Under orders that he had no choice, no ability but to follow.
Now they returned the favor.
Day and night, around the clock, whether his eyes were open, wide awake, or closed in an attempt to get some semblance of rest. Those memories, those people, were all there, reminding him of the flood of death that followed in his wake for decades.
He’s learned some techniques, some ways to help calm his racing mind and chase the haunting presence away, however temporarily it might be. Sometimes they helped, sometimes they didn’t but he clung to them nonetheless.
A habit that he’s undeniably grateful for when he finds himself not nearly as alone in his apartment, the one he only just started tentatively calling home, as he thought he was. His hand is trembling, he can feel it. All of him, actually, all but the abomination attached to his left shoulder that refused to allow for even the most basic human emotion to reflect in movement.
“I thought that was you,” the figure spoke, shadowed by the lack of light, only the light over the stove illuminating the main room of the apartment. Voice low and curious, a faint hint of something underneath that Bucky was in no state to identify, from the comfortable sprawl he’d taken up on the cushy chair Bucky had found the wherewithal to choose for his living room just weeks ago. “I thought I was imagining it for a bit there, but you’ve finally made your way back, haven’t you?”
Bucky sank down onto the floor just inside the door, unable to gather words to answer the question despite his blaring instincts and the whirling of mechanically controlled metal plates that demanded he prepare for attack. But he couldn’t. Not here, not now. Not now that he was no longer a slate wiped clean. Not now that he’d finally begun to reclaim himself.
Not now that he remembered enough to recognize that voice.
He hated these dreams.
Perhaps even more than the devastating memories of the too many lives he’d taken as the Soldier.
Those, at least, he knew he deserved no matter what anyone else tried to insist.
Steve had only returned to his memory just barely a week ago. Unsurprisingly, now that Bucky recalled enough to not be surprised, those memories had returned with the same determined tenacity as the boy he left behind, decades ago.
The same boy currently sprawled in a lazy fashion across his chair, legs flung across one arm, foot bouncing to some song only he could hear, while his head rested on the other. Virtually unchanged by the near-century since the last time Bucky had seen him. It was only the lack of book and pencil that this current illusion differed from the memories.
But Steve was always unchanged, always just the same, when his memory visited Bucky like this.
That, Bucky thought, was exactly why he loathed these dreams, these twisted memories, so much. Some part of Bucky wondered if he didn’t miss not remembering, if not remembering might hurt less.
In the space of a blink, Steve was in front of him, his slight frame somehow even smaller than Bucky remembered. Though, he guessed, Bucky hadn’t exactly shrunk any. But the nearness only served to confirm everything that all of Bucky’s senses were trying to tell him.
There was no pulse, no heartbeat, steady or the irregular thrum that memory suggested should be there. There was no wheeze winding through his breath, there was no breath at all. For all Hydra had done to him, for all the enhancements of his senses, Bucky couldn’t sense anything of the sort at all.
Besides, the Steve that he’d known, once upon a time, would have just as likely tripped over his own feet attempting to move that fast.
A cool hand on his face drew Bucky from his spiraling thoughts. It meant little, though, Steve’s hands were always cold, his fragile heart always struggling to push warmth into extremities. His memory was kind enough to grant him the remembered sensation of chilled fingers and toes being pressed against various spots on his body in search of warmth.
Bucky knew he’d regret it, he knew it wasn’t something his scrambled, haunted mind would let go of any time soon, but he let himself look. He wanted to, truthfully, to ingrain the face, the person, Hydra had stolen from him, just like they’d stolen everything else, up to and including himself.
The differences were what latched onto his attention, refusing to budge.
The lack of heartbeat, the silence of his lungs were glaring, unmissable but Steve, his Steve, never wore what the Steve in front of him did. They fit, for one. Fit as though tailored to his slight frame in the way that they could never afford for him, back then. The too big, too loose shirts and trousers only held up by suspenders were gone.
He was pale, not unlike the pallor he took on when illness struck hard enough that Bucky was so sure it was finally going to succeed in stealing him away. But there was no fever that Bucky could sense. His eyes, the same blue that Bucky wasn’t sure how Hydra ever managed to make him forget, were sharp and clear, not hazy and glassy like he could only vaguely recall.
His Steve never visited his memory like this, always in the form he only recently began to remember.
There was something in that stare though, the intensity, the unnatural way the light reflected, Steve looking him over just as Bucky couldn’t resist doing the same. But something Bucky couldn’t pinpoint, couldn't name, set him on edge in an eerily similar way as the chair had done.
Danger.
But.
Dream or memory, real or hallucination, Steve Rogers had never been anything of the sort. Not for Bucky, at least.
There were hands on his face, firm and steady. Touching him, chilled thumbs tracing over the line of his cheekbones. Staring and studying him as though having every bit of a hard time believing that he, that Bucky, was real.
Maybe neither of them were.
That was a thought.
For as recent as the recovery of those memories was, Steve’s ghost had visited him often. Perhaps even too often considering how much those visits ached and tore at his chest.
It had been a very long week, stuffed full with haunting, chilling dreams that left him untethered and unsteady. Hyperaware and hating every moment but, simultaneously, needing it to continue.
But that Steve, those visits, Steve had never touched him. Had never come close enough that Bucky might mistakenly reach out to touch him. Bucky had been grateful for it too, unwilling to lose the image once again by reaching out and disturbing whatever caused it to happen to begin with.
“Steve?” He managed at last, as unsteady and strained as it was.
“Yeah, Buck,” Steve murmured, sounding no less sure or confident, an audible crack in the initial composure, but Bucky could hear those silent lungs draw air to speak the words.
“I don’t understand,” Bucky said. He tried not to so much as blink. It was familiar too, that unwillingness to lose what little bit of Steve his mind would allow him, no matter how painfully haunting it was. Bucky lifted his hand, fingers curling around a fine-boned wrist in an anchoring grip. “You…I remember. Becca said. She said you were–.”
“I know,” Steve said, hands tightening just slightly against Bucky’s face. “I got the same word about you, though much later. I was…out of touch for a while, unfortunately. Looks like the news was slightly overstated on both accounts.” He smiled, a dark unfamiliar thing on such a familiar face. “Sort of, I suppose.”
“You,” Bucky frowned and shook his head sharply, ignoring the sharp pain of regret when Steve’s hands fell away from his face. “How did–?”
“I saw you,” Steve shrugged, shifting to kneel in front of Bucky, fitting between Bucky’s planted feet without the need for hardly any adjustment, his hands falling to rest over each of Bucky’s knees. “On the train, a little over a week ago. I was…it doesn’t matter. But I saw you and I thought…I thought I was imagining things. It would hardly be the first time.” Steve grimaced and shot a guilty-looking glance sideways and shrugged again. “I did some research for my own sanity and then. And then I-uh-I followed you.”
A week ago. Roughly the same time that memories of Steve, of before, started flooding back into Bucky’s mind with the overwhelming force of a tidal wave.
It was a disturbing thought, actually, considering how overly aware of his surroundings Bucky tended to be these days. His subconscious had clearly sensed Steve’s presence, given the return of those memories, but he hadn’t. How had he not noticed he was followed?
The silence was strange enough to distract him, not entirely but it was enough to pull himself mostly out of the spiral that being followed unknowingly wanted to send him into. He latched onto it, attempting to puzzle it out.
He probably wouldn’t notice it, now or previously, he wouldn’t be capable of noticing what was off, what was wrong, if Hydra hadn’t gone and done what they’d done to him. But they had, and he was what he was so it was impossible not to notice. It was equally impossible not to fixate on it.
Frankly, it was that or spiral and Bucky was getting tired of spiraling.
The unnatural silence of a glaring lack of pulse, of steady (or even unsteady) heartbeat, the missing draw of breath, all questions that he wanted answers to, was a suitable alternative to spiraling, he thought.
A low, thoughtful sound drew Bucky’s attention from where he belatedly realized he’d been staring at Steve’s chest in an attempt to either draw the familiar sounds into existence or, perhaps, find the explanation for the absence himself.
“You can ask, Buck,” Steve murmured, fingertips tracing patterns over Bucky’s kneecaps, oddly soothing no matter how strange it seemed like it should be. “or I can just…tell you. If it’s better. Easier.”
“I don’t,” Bucky grimaced and shook his head. “I don’t think I know what to ask.” Even without the bizarre situation, Bucky still struggled with asking in general, though that wasn’t information he was interested in volunteering, not even to Steve.
Steve’s expression darkened briefly, setting off the danger alarms in Bucky’s mind once again. It cleared just as quickly, replaced by something more considering. “Let’s get off the floor first,” he said, gentle but decisive, gripping Bucky’s wrists and tugging with more strength than should be possible as he got to his feet.
He stayed stubbornly tight-lipped until they were settled on Bucky’s couch, Steve seated sideways on the cushion, facing Bucky.
“Do you want the story or the answer?” Steve asked bluntly after another brief stretch of unnatural silence.
“The answer,” Bucky said automatically and then paused. “Both?” Details, he knew, could be as significant as the answer itself.
Steve studied him for a moment and nodded shortly, shifting in his seat. “Becca…wasn’t exactly wrong when she wrote to you,” he admitted ruefully. “You shipped out and I tried again. And again. Obviously it didn’t get me very far.”
“I’d say good but,” Bucky grimaced.
But maybe it wasn’t good because something happened, hadn’t it? On one hand, Steve was here. They were both here when, really, neither should be. On the other hand, the Steve sitting next to him hadn’t grown, hadn’t changed. The Steve sitting next to him had no humanly bodily functions that Bucky could sense at all. That meant something, even if he didn’t yet know what.
Steve shrugged, not quite dismissive but somewhere close to it. A gesture that Bucky wouldn’t have known to be familiar until that moment. Echoing through his memory from the too many occasions that Steve brushed off being dismissed and overlooked himself, brushed off outright mocking and scorn like it didn’t bother him a bit.
Before Bucky could speak though, before he could grab onto that familiarity to try to formulate words, Steve continued, tone firm as though, maybe, he also recognized the pattern and refused to let Bucky at least try to make it better. That, too, was familiar.
“I guess the long story, short, I took the old shortcut back to the apartment on the tail end of another rejection,” Steve continued shortly, “I got jumped from behind in the alley just around the corner. Never did see a face or figure out who it was but,” he paused with a wince and another dismissive, one-shouldered shrug. “I came to somewhere else, not the alley or anywhere familiar, maybe a few weeks later, time’s still hard to track, and woke up dead. Vampire.”
“Vampire,” Bucky repeated flatly. It wasn’t, exactly, that he didn’t believe it, though he was having a pretty hard time wrapping his mind around the idea. The world was weird, he knew that, he was a prime example. Hell, the entire Avengers team were prime examples.
But…somehow vampires weren't what he expected to hear, even with the low levels of expectations he actually had.
“Afraid so,” Steve answered with a smirk that was far more amused than necessary. “I was…gone for a while. They keep the newly turned on a tight leash to limit the risk of exposure.”
“So you’re, what, miniature Dracula, blood and all?” Bucky asked, eyes narrowed and head cocked to the side, his mind attempting to make the pieces fit.
Steve snorted and shot him an exasperated glare, undoubtedly more toward the ‘miniature’ than the rest of the fumbled question. “Not exactly like the stories, no, they overshoot somethings and miss other things completely, but close enough for the moment, I guess.”
“Like what?” Bucky pressed, the foreign sense of eager curiosity clinging to him.
“I-,” Steve hesitated, cutting himself off abruptly and simply stared at Bucky for a moment before looking away.
For all the nonchalance and confidence that Steve seemed to have carried himself with up until that point, Bucky thought that, maybe, waking up dead wasn’t quite as uncomplicated as Steve made it sound. He’d always been good at putting up a stoic front, pretending that everything was fine, even when it very much wasn’t. He might still look like the same kid, might even have some of the same old tells and do a damned good job at pretending, but Bucky thought maybe this Steve was as different from the kid in the 40’s as Bucky was from himself from the same time.
“But you’re back,” Bucky noted, changing the subject abruptly and with no amount of grace.
“I am,” Steve nodded with a small, fleeting smile. “I figure that I must’ve done something right, impressed the right people or at least not annoyed them too much. Otherwise, I’d be the permanent kind of dead. As it is, I’ve been back here, more or less to my own devices, for…well for a while now.”
A while. Any sort of timeline was virtually impossible to sort out with that answer. He was gone a while, he’d been back a while. Intentional, no doubt. He supposed it didn’t really matter, in the end. They were both taken, not too long from each other from the best Bucky could gather, yet they were both here, when they shouldn’t be, more or less alive even if only on technicality.
Bucky supposed that meant they had some time to work back toward believing that the other was real and not just imagination playing cruel tricks. Once upon a time, Bucky knew he’d had a knack for working through that stoic wall and drawing out whatever it was that Steve didn’t want to admit was eating at him.
It wasn’t and couldn’t be the same as it was but that didn’t mean nothing else could be built from the old foundations.
“I thought they always said that vampires have to be invited in?” Bucky asked curiously, the various stories he’d read in his youth and since his recovery pinging through his mind.
“That’s more or less true, yes,” Steve confirmed.
“Then…?” Bucky titled his head, gesturing to the apartment as a whole.
“I clearly remember the last time I asked to be invited into your home,” Steve smirked knowingly.
Bucky remembered that too, if only just. Maybe not as precisely as Steve seemed to but he remembered. It was as annoying as it was relieving, the memories drawn forward since Steve apparently found him on the train, and even more so in the short time they’d been talking.
“You called me an idiot and told me to stop knocking and ‘feel free to move my skinny ass into anywhere you go,’” Steve continued, clearly reciting the words from memory.
Bucky had to admit that it sounded exactly like something he would, and likely did, say. He didn’t say that though, instead he huffed and shook his head with a smirk of his own. “Always a loophole with you, isn’t there?”
“Since when has a technicality stopped me from trying anyway?” Steve returned, smirk growing into a grin when Bucky huffed a laugh.